flightplan is a tale of a woman who is travelling from berlin to new york with her daughter after having just lost her husband.
jodie foster in a metal enclosure with a distraught daughter … now where have i seen this before?
but, unlike panic room, where the thrill element kept your heart racing throughout the movie, flightplan is just … not that well planned.
midflight, foster wakes up to find (or not) that her daughter is missing and what’s worse, there is no record of her ever having boarded. a harrassed-looking captain (sean bean) and even more harrasseder looking air marshall (peter sarsgaard) do their best to convince foster she must be have gone loony from the loss of her husband and imagined the whole thing up, but somehow the look of conviction on our heroine’s face convinces them (and consequently the audience) that things are not what they seem.
this obviously means that the thrill element begins a fatal downward spiral during the second half of the movie as foster goes on a huge (wo)manhunt to find her daughter. i just sat dumb with disbelief that an aircraft can have that many empty passageways, and yet i cannot even get up on an international flight for 2 seconds without bumping into a couple of coffee carts and being greeted with a few “please keep your seatbelt fastened at all times sir!”
whether foster’s conviction is redeemed or not forms the climax of the movie which, not surprisingly, takes on a few additional, needless and, ultimately, tiring twists. in the end this so called thriller seemed more contrived and convoluted than what it needed to be.
this is one flight you can plan on missing.